Cost Sankey Diagrams show Added Value

While browsing through some of my older bookmarks I discovered this page of what seems to be an information portal of one of a German federal ministry. The Sankey diagram for cost flows they show reminded me of a feature in the Umberto material flow management software, which I always wanted to inspect in more detail.

Using their 30-day trial version I worked with one of the simple demo examples they provide. Basically this software is a modeling tool for process systems and analysis of material flows within any kind of process system (production plant, supply chain, region, …). Sankey diagrams in Umberto are not the default view for material flows, but one can switch from the normal “Material Flow Network” view to the Sankey view.

Even though the Sankey diagram feature of the software would need some retouching, I was surprised and extremely pleased to see a “Cost Sankey” feature.

You can enter material direct cost for all materials (in the ‘bucket factory’ example of the demo all materials already have a “market price” property), as well as fixed and variable process costs. The variable process costs are spread over the process throughput using ‘machine hours’ or ‘work hours’ as cost drivers (i.e. to link cost creation to the material throughput). Thus, at every process (shown with blue squares in the flow diagram) the costs -or should I say: the value – increases. Going from left to right along the general flow direction in the Sankey diagram you can see clearly that the growing magnitude of the Sankey cost flows… a kind of ‘Value Added Sankey diagram’.

The above screenshots show the overall cost for the three products produced in the bucket factory (Fig.1), the cost per unit for each of the three products of the bucket factory (Fig.2).

The following two cost flow Sankey diagrams are for the individual costing units ‘plastic bucket’ and ‘watering can’ (Fig.3 and 4). Please note that on theses diagrams a part of the machines is not being used, so they don’t add any process costs to the costing unit (or don’t contribute to the value added). Unfortunately you can only display either mass or energy flows in one Sankey diagram, so the energy costs (from the circle labeled ‘other materials’) are not shown as a Sankey flow, even though they add to the price for each product.